Friday Book Roundup

Using economics to explain everything: in the same vein as Freakonomics comes Steven E. Landsburg’s More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics. [The New York Times] Poet and fiction writer Ha Jin’s new novel, A Free Life, follows a Chinese immigrant family as they struggle to earn enough and find their place in a country they can’t call home. The author is a former winner of the National Book Award and two-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award. Booklist writes of A Free Life, “Capacious, pointillistic, empathic, and tender, Ha Jin’s tale of one immigrant family’s odyssey in America affirms humankind’s essential mission, to honor life.” [Booklist] In Brian Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Politics, it’s not that voters are ignorant of the political issues, it’s that they’re wrong about the issues. That wrongness leads to politicians enacting policies that aren’t good for society. Therefore, only the right people should vote and economists should run the country. Well, sort of. [The New Yorker]

Two literary anniversaries: the 50th for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the 100th for Jack London’s largely forgotten memoir, The Road. [The Nation]

With international tourism booming, fair trade travel is crucial, according to Leo Hickman’s new book, The Final Call. Along his worldwide researching Hickman sees tourists like destructive armies, the fish tastes like kerosene, and he finds that in the melting Alps, there’s a market for a truck-full of stolen snow. [Guardian Unlimited] In a novel devoid of plot and developed characters and drama, David Markson’s The Last Novel is “a collage of very short anecdotes, apocryphal legends, aphorisms, lurid gossip about writers and artists’ lives and deaths…like a series of abstract paintings.” [The New York Times]